Conan O’Brien Says Success Is Making Podcasts More Like Late-Night TV

Conan O’Brien left late-night television behind five years ago. Somehow, it keeps finding him.

Speaking Wednesday evening at Bloomberg Screentime, the two-day media and entertainment conference in Los Angeles, O’Brien described how his podcast, Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, has gradually picked up some of the very trappings of the TV format he spent nearly three decades hosting.

It started when SiriusXM suggested he do some podcasts in front of an audience. Those went well, so they moved to a theater. Then someone suggested adding “some shtick” to fill out the show, so O’Brien brought in writers. Music followed.

“And one day I’m doing it there and I’m like, ‘All right, we’ll take a break. We’ll be right back,’” O’Brien recalled.

That was when it hit him.

“There’s a giant organism in the universe that demands that this is what it is,” he said.

O’Brien stressed that his team has “mostly avoided” turning the podcast into a full-fledged late-night show, but the experience speaks to a broader tension he sees in podcasting as the format matures.

Part of what originally appealed to O’Brien about podcasts was the freedom they offered from the rigid structure of television talk shows. After years of conducting six- or seven-minute interviews while watching for a wrap sign, he suddenly had the ability to sit with someone for an hour or more.

But increasingly, he said, podcasts are becoming part of the same publicity machine that once governed those late-night bookings.

O’Brien said he recently discussed the phenomenon with Kareem Rahma, the host of SubwayTakes, asking whether he had experienced what O’Brien called becoming “the victim of your success.”

“It’s when you start out doing this thing where you’re just going to talk to the artist, and it’s very pure,” O’Brien explained. But as a show becomes more successful, he said, appearances begin arriving with requirements attached: an episode needs to drop at a certain time to coincide with a project, and there may be subjects a guest will or won’t discuss.

“You start to see it calcified because that’s what happens to things,” he said.

O’Brien said he and his team have pushed back against that tendency, and argued that the podcast format continues to allow him to have some of the best interviews of his career.

He pointed to recent conversations with Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Paul McCartney, and Mick Jagger, noting that there is no pre-interview and no live audience putting pressure on guests to perform.

“If you connect with them in the moment and lock eyes with them, you never know what they’re going to say,” he said.

O’Brien said that at this point in his career, he prefers that looser environment to traditional late night.

“I was very fortunate to have that format when that format was the thing to have, and I did it for a long time and I loved it,” he said. “But now at this stage in my life and my career, having these kinds of conversations with people and not obsessing about what I’m wearing, not having makeup on—it just feels like this is an appropriate place to be.”

How long that place will remain SiriusXM is another question.

Th company acquired O’Brien’s Team Coco in 2022 as part of a deal that included a five-year talent agreement running through 2027. Asked Wednesday whether he planned to renew, O’Brien wasn’t ready to commit.

“I haven’t even thought about it yet,” he said, joking that 2027 felt so distant that “it’s like 2023 right now.”

“We’ll get to that when the time comes,” he added, “but I assure you all will be well.”

Earlier in the conversation, O’Brien joked that his ideal arrangement would be “to have all the IP back, but keep the money they gave me upfront and then have a lot more money than that.”